Bigamy, Forgery, Lies: Accused Colonel’s Epic Flameout

Army Col. James Johnson, now facing a court-martial for charges including fraud and bigamy, passes out gifts at a ceremony in Afghanistan, October 2010. Photo: DVIDS

Once, Col. James H. Johnson was an honor graduate of West Point, on his way to a storied career capped by his command of the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. While leading the brigade, he had an affair with an Iraqi Kurdish woman that cost him his command, his career, and his honor.

Next week, Johnson will face a court-martial in Germany. He pleads not guilty to a host of charges ranging from bigamy to making false statements to financial misconduct. He is one of the most senior officers to be charged with misconduct during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

It all started in 2005, when Johnson, a married man, met a woman in northern Iraq — also married — while in battalion command. Allegedly, to win her over he used thousands of dollars in government money over the years to pay for a variety of favors for her family, and falsified receipts to cover his tracks, as Nancy Montgomery recounts in Stars and Stripes.

After the 173rd deployed to Afghanistan in late 2009, Johnson assured the public that he was spending his brigade’s wartime reconstruction cash in a more transparent way than ever before. But according to Johnson’s charge sheet, he was diverting some of it to his paramour’s family. He filed an invoice for nearly $60,000 to pay her father for services ostensibly rendered on Forward Operating Base Shenk. According to the charge sheet, “the deliverables were not produced nor received as required by the contract, and was then known by the said Colonel James H. Johnson to be false and fraudulent.”

Johnson would still be in command today had his wife, Kris, not exposed the affair, and the alleged official misconduct that protected it, to Army investigators. Perhaps most brazen: After undergoing surgery at home in New York, Kris Johnson learned that she had been discontinued from her military insurance.

“The reason turned out to be that the colonel had enrolled another wife,” Montgomery writes.

That’s the basis for charging James Johnson with bigamy. The colonel had been living with the Iraqi woman at the 173rd’s home base in Vicenza, Italy — which the Army charges was “to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces and of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces” — and married her in November in Montana before divorcing Kris Johnson.

An officer’s private life has professional ramifications, since commanders are supposed to set moral examples for the troops under their leadership. That’s why Conduct Unbecoming an Officer is a punishable offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Johnson lost command of the brigade in March 2011 after the investigation began. It attracted a lot of attention: While the Navy fires officers at or around Johnson’s rank with surprising frequency, the Army rarely does.

Johnson is pleading not guilty. While he tells the court martial that some of his decisions might appear “poor in hindsight,” he insists his actions had “no effect on the command.” The brigade deployed to the volatile eastern Afghanistan provinces of Logar, Wardak and Kunar from November 2009 to November 2010. Toward the end of his tour, Johnson boasted that he had increased the brigade’s transparency over the discretionary cash at its disposal for Afghan reconstruction.

“We’re seeing great progress with a program that we call the People’s Development Fund,” Johnson told the Pentagon press corps in September 2010. “Previously, coalition forces have exclusively allocated CERP [Commander’s Emergency Response Program] dollars. This is a process that may not be transparent. Using the People’s Development Fund, it provides transparent district governance that empowers district committees to prioritize CERP and other funding sources for their communities.”

Kris Johnson stands to lose her own funding sources if her husband is convicted. According to Montgomery, she would lose her share of his retirement pay, education expenses for their children, and other benefits, “worth some $4 million over an average lifespan.” Kris Johnson plans to testify against James Johnson next week — apparently, as a matter of honor.